The motif of “death agony” in Joseph Brodsky’s “Stanzas”

The article is devoted to the analysis of Joseph Brodsky’s long poem “Stanzas” (1968), which has not previously been subjected to detailed philological analysis, a number of images and motifs of which cause discrepancies. The research aims to comprehend the poetic and semantic components of the genre of a “valediction”, explicated in the text in orientation to the traditions of Western European poetry, mainly by John Donne and Dante Alighieri. It is noted that the poem “Stanzas” was created during the period of Brodsky’s dramatic break with Marina Basmanova, although, unlike other texts, the work was not prefaced with the initials “M. B.”. Nevertheless, as shown in the paper, the leveled latent addressing does not cancel out the structure of the dialogical construction of the farewell verse, an (in)direct appeal to an invisible interlocutor. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the fact that it traces how the central thesis about the drama of lovers’ separation is gradually reinterpreted by Brodsky, it begins to acquire the features of separation-death, half the way to death, with the connotations of a sublimely solemn and mystical nature attached to it. As a result, it is proved that, in the view of Brodsky’s persona, the tragedy of saying goodbye to his beloved lies not in the eternal separation of former lovers (a traditional aspect of scientific and critical interpretations), but in the very fact of the ontological existence of separation.